When the Cheering Stopped Read Online Free PDF

nothing could bring me real rest until I had pledged to you my love and my allegiance.
    Your own
    Edith
    All of that day passed with no reply from the White House. The next day and the next brought no answer. She was shattered. It appeared the romance, at his wish, was over. But on the third day Grayson appeared. He did not even shake hands with her before he began to speak. “I beg that you will come with me to the White House. The President is very ill. It is a desperate situation. Neither Miss Margaret nor Miss Bones is here, so I will have to act as chaperon.” She said, “Did the President ask you to come?” “No, I told him I was coming, and he said it would be unfair to you and weak in himto ask it. If you could see him you would not hesitate. He looks as I imagine the martyrs looked when they were broken on the wheel.”
    She asked Grayson to wait and stepped out of the room. Her letter! What had happened to it? What was he doing to her? But she had written, “I will stand by you.” She rejoined Grayson and went with him to the President’s room. He was lying in bed. His face was pale. He held out a hand and it was cold. She took it and clasped it in her own. When she released it the waiting and the doubts and fears were gone forever from them both. Later it would be whispered that she bought off Mrs. Peck with giant sums and that Louis Brandeis was appointed to the Supreme Court because he was the intermediary who carried the money; later it would be said Colonel House took Mrs. Peck to Europe to get her out of the way and that she was on a regular salary from McAdoo’s Treasury Department in order to insure her silence; later it would be rumored Mrs. Peck was about to institute a breach-of-promise suit against the President; later all these things and more would be said and wits would call him Peck’s Bad Boy, but these stories did not touch them because they loved each other and always would. And she would learn, months later, when he confessed it to her, that he had not had the courage to open her letter. He carried it in his pocket until their honeymoon, when he drew it out, the envelope worn and frayed, and read what she had written: “I will stand by you for love.”
    On October 7, 1915, they announced their engagement via Joe Tumulty, who handed out typed sheets to the reporters assigned to the White House. To Ellen’s brother the President said that Ellen told him before she died that she wanted this, and the brother said, “That is just the way she loved you.” An old friend of the family, whose sister the President addressed as “Cousin,” said to him that she had prayed he would be comforted and took this as an answer to those prayers. “What do you think, Cousin Mary?” he asked her sister. “To tell you the truth, I was a little shocked at first,” said the woman. “So was I,” said the President. He wrote another friend, “The last fourteen months have seemed for me, in a world upset, like fourteen years. It is not the same world in which my dearEllen lived; and one of the last things she said to me was that she hoped that what has happened now would happen. It seemed to me incredible then, and would, I think, have continued to seem so if I had not been brought into contact with Mrs. Galt.” He even wrote Mrs. Peck, saying he knew she would rejoice for him in this “blessing.”
    The afternoon the news was released he went to call on Mrs. Galt’s mother for the first time, and he asked her, along with a sister and brother of the prospective bride, to come to dinner at the White House. The next day the mother and daughter went with him to Philadelphia for the opening game of the World Series. The crowds cheered her; her dimpled smile was enchanting. On October 10, for the first time he dined with her alone at her home.
    They set the wedding date for December 18. In the remaining two months of